THE RAWLINGS BOYS
The Macon Telegraph had the following editorial regarding the pardon board’s action and the foolish appeal for a pardon for them, made by the Atlanta Journal:
“The governor and the pardon board have commuted the sentences of the two Rawlings boys, Milton and Jesse, who were condemned to death for the assassination of the Carter children, to life terms in the penitentiary.
“In taking this course, these responsible powers have yielded to a certain widely prevailing and well-defined public sentiment that has grown up around this case, despite the fact that it ranks among the most atrocious in criminal records. Notwithstanding that capital punishment is as old as our history, it never ceases to affect with the violence of a shock the sensitive, civilized nature.
“Our higher instincts revolt against the deliberate extinction of life in a fellow human being, even under the forms of law. When the subject is young and adolescent, just entering upon the vigor of lusty manhood, with all the senses and faculties keyed up in the fullest accord with the physical world, it does special violence to and intensifies the repugnance of the finer senses at the thought of putting a violent end to it all.
“It is in concession to this sentiment that the Rawlings boys are primarily indebted for the commutation of their sentences to imprisonment for life. It was considered, in addition, that they had been subject to the evil influence of their father and that to this extent there were mitigating circumstances in their case. It had been generally foreseen that if the law was allowed to take its course in the case of the father, clemency to this extent would be granted to the sons.
“The course of the governor and the board of pardons in repeatedly respiting the boys and postponing the consideration of their plea until the old man was disposed of clearly foreshadowed the purpose of the governor and the board. So settled was this purpose in the minds of the members of the board of pardons that, in taking up and disposing of the matter after the old man’s execution, they did not even wait to have the attorney for the boys present his case to them.
“Such are the merits of the grounds upon which the Rawlings boys have been snatched from the gibbet and accorded the full span of their natural lives in which to do penance for their fiendish and inhuman deed of doing to death the two Carter children.
“The Telegraph has been in sympathy with the course taken in the case up to this point, but when this measure of unmerited clemency is immediately made the ground for claiming the recognition of the virtual innocence of the young murderers and the demand for their full pardon, then in the name of public decency and the public welfare, The Telegraph feels called on to protest.
“It feels that it would be but a base return for, and a most perverted consequence of, the clemency shown in this case to turn these young assassins out upon society. We can scarcely credit our senses or the sanity of some people when we read stuff like this in the Atlanta Journal. The Journal says:
‘The general sentiment in favor of saving these boys from the gallows is based on the idea—which we pointed out yesterday—we believe that the person who was really guilty has paid the penalty for his crime, and that it would not be an act of justice, under the circumstances, to punish the tools he used.
‘If they are pardoned, they will be pardoned on this basis.
‘And we respectfully submit that they should be either pardoned or hanged.
‘To commute the sentence to one of life imprisonment would be the most illogical thing on earth. It would be to recognize that they should be saved from punishment without in reality saving them. If they are innocent, and under the circumstances, we think they are essentially innocent so far as any moral consciousness of crime goes, why should they be imprisoned for life?
‘If the authorities go so far as to commute the sentence to life imprisonment, they should go further and grant a pardon. There is no logic in stopping halfway. A recognition of the theory that the old man was almost solely guilty is not consistent with condemning the boys to life imprisonment any more than it is consistent with giving them to the hangman.
“The law has claimed its victim in the father’s death. The real murderer has been hanged. These boys were the tools, not essentially guilty. We again urge their pardon on these grounds.’
“Not an act of justice to punish murderers because they were ‘tools’? Why, then, was Alf Moore hanged?
“‘They should be either pardoned or hanged?’ They were scheduled to hang, but they must have preferred the life sentence as they asked for it.
“‘Commutation to life imprisonment would be to recognize that they should be saved from punishment?’ It is, if ‘life imprisonment’ is not punishment to them.
“‘They are essentially innocent so far as any moral consciousness of crime goes. Why should they be imprisoned for life?’ Because having committed a brutal murder, they are without moral consciousness of crime, and it was better to turn out so many savage animals than to turn three young murderers devoid of the moral sense to appreciate murder loose upon society.”Blackstone, in his textbook on criminal law, says the objects of punishment are threefold: to amend the offender; to deter others by dread of his example; or to deprive the criminal of the power to do future mischief. All three of these objects will be subserved in the confinement for the rest of their lives of the three Rawlings boys who, on the very threshold of manhood, have raised their hands against society and violated its most sacred canons without ever having manifested, as the Journal justly says, any moral consciousness of crime.”